Climbing Food and Supplement Reviews

You can't climb if you don't eat, and if you want to climb your best, you need to fuel up with the right foods. Climbing magazine tests energy bars, gels, nutritional supplements, recovery foods, and other specialty foods for athletic performance. We even test that essential workout recovery drink: beer!

Despite splitter weather, maximum strength, and high psych, bad skin sidelined our tester on a trip to the Buttermilks, California. “I couldn’t warm up without that throbbing pain you get from climbing on tattered skin,” he said. “One night with Tip Juice slathered all over my splits and tips, and I healed up enough to try my project the next day without causing more damage and pain.”

For crack climbers, the holy grail of hand tape is the super-sticky, 1.5-inch athletic tape from Mueller Sports Medicine. Unless you have visited Moab, Utah, where the Pagan and Gearheads stores stocked Mueller tape for desertsplitter fiends, this stuff has been hard to find in the U.S.

“I drink more than a gallon of water in a day of climbing, feel thirsty the whole session, and can tell my body isn’t absorbing the fluids,” our chief tester complained. So we gave her Nuun All Day Hydration tablets ($29.95 for a 4-pack; nuun.com), and she noticed a difference right away: “Drop a tablet in 16 ounces of water, and my thirst actually feels quenched.”

The joint-crushing and tendon-aggravating hours of gym training are incredibly hard on the body because of the high intensity and repetition, so much so that recovery techniques have become just as important as the hours spent pulling plastic. Since rest is sometimes out of the question for obsessive-compulsive climbers, those people need an alternative solution that expedites healing. That’s where the 110% Alchemy Arm Sleeves ($125; 110playharder.com) come into play.